--I KEEP PICKING FIGHTS WITH MYSELF

 

                                                                  The Psychic                      

My mother says her friend is psychic, that she can predict the weather and impending divorces, so when the woman comes to visit I’m just as nervous as I was when Doc gave me the news.

            It might not have been so awkward if Mother had been with, but be that as it may, I offer “Coffee or tea?” and the psychic says, “Yes, black,” which throws me even more off balance because it could be either, right?

            While I fill a canister with tap water, she slinks up behind me like a cat as her supple hands move across my little bump of a belly, threads of electricity humming from her fingertips, taking measure, reading signs, tapping here and there the way you’d test a melon.  I wait a good long time before I finally say, “Well?”

            She removes her hands and dusts her palms off, a baker done for the day, and says definitively that it’s a boy and that he’ll look just like his father but be as destructive, too.

            When she’s gone, a scalding coil of guilt sluices through my gut, and still I look up the number and place the call.  I’m as strong as the next woman, yet, warned or not, there’s only room for so much evil in this world.